A Conversation with Razan Alzayani
Razan Alzayani is a film photographer, filmmaker, and breathwork practitioner who floats between Lisbon, Tbilisi, and the Middle East. She spent most of the past decade working in news and documentary storytelling for the AP and Vice, and co-founded Kerning Cultures, a podcast telling radio documentaries around the Middle East and its diaspora. She is open to commissions in portrait, editorial, and commercial work, and is launching Stereo868 with her partner Rony Karkar.
Razan Alzayani
Lisbon · Tbilisi · Middle East
Razan Alzayani Inspiration is everywhere. Literally. It took me a long time to realise this and be in tune with myself and my present environment to really understand and have it feed into my work. Right now, my biggest inspiration is from observing nature and the way we interact with it. I had this incessant desire to travel to the ends of the earth to seek inspiration. It took a pandemic and a series of massive changes in my life to realise it was always in front of me, especially in the most mundane moments.
I come from a photojournalism background and I love Abbas Attar's work. There is a famous photo of a group of Iranian women sitting at a coffee shop, it's black and white and out of focus. It is wonderful and as the viewer you are completely immersed in that moment in time. He is absolutely the fly on the wall there but also elicits acknowledgement from one of the women. For a long time I aimed to be that invisible in my work, there but not there, documenting and immersing myself with people from all walks of life. Being the best fly on the wall to capture the truest moment.
"It took a pandemic and a series of massive changes in my life to realise inspiration was always in front of me, especially in the most mundane moments."
Razan Alzayani My creativity involves a lot of solitude and space and time to think and just be left alone with my process and thoughts. I don't have a strict process, I just follow a disciplined flow from inspiration to result.
Razan Alzayani I embrace it and we can always use it to our advantage. Although these days with AI I do feel that the whole creative industry is unsure where this will lead us. The art of documenting something real and true will still be of great value. I am mostly shooting film though, and I do love the meditative process of working through film stocks and colour hues and just enjoying unexpected results.
Razan Alzayani My partner Rony Karkar and I just launched Stereo868, our brain child. We are two filmmakers and photographers living a momentous time in the Arab world. We love documenting our rising subcultures, from music to cannabis to fashion to innovation in tech, and we work with creatives on projects that inspire us. What we know most is that we want to keep surrounding ourselves in this work, documenting our beautiful region with all its nuances in our own way.
- Community and love in all its forms
- Self-awareness
- Access to nature and feeling the sun on my face
- Embracing every emotion
- Delicious slow cooked meals
- Curiosity and joy for life
- The ability and conviction to say no
The origins of Pranayama stem back thousands of years to the Hindu and Tibetan traditions. Prana means breath, but also life energy. Yama means to control. The breath is both an action, a movement, the motion of the inhale and the exhale, and it is also a place of deep inquiry into the self.
Razan first walked into a breathwork class in 2019 and was transported to what she can only recall as deep space, stillness and an inner knowing. She now offers breathwork and herbal medicine offerings on a sliding scale, believing that low-cost quality care and free care are both important, and that systematic oppression, be it financial, political, or racial, restricts access to care.
"Unless we decide to personally change the systems we exist within, live within and work with, then nothing will change."
Batroun, Razan Alzayani
